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Udall said he welcomed Levin’s alternative approach that will still keep commanding officers in the mix. “I just think Sen. Gillibrand approach has the potential to move us more quickly to the goals we want to meet,” he said.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who isn’t on the Armed Services Committee but backs Gillibrand’s bill, said she may have more luck before the full Senate.

“I know her as a person not to give up,” Grassley said. “We’re going to face this and I’m going to help her.”

Asked why she’s faced so much resistance, the Iowa Republican replied, “It’s this simple. Around Congress, the Pentagon has got great power and that’s about it. I’ve been working to straighten things out in the Pentagon for 30 years so I know what it is. There’s great respect for people who have stars on their shoulders and they don’t like it.”

A senior Senate GOP aide said Gillibrand willlikely find more friendly terrain as she pushes her amendment before the entire chamber. “Things can still change, absolutely,” the aide said.

Gillibrand, meantime, said she’s going to work toward winning a simple Senate majority. “I think it has a chance of passing,” she told reporters. “I think if we keep working hard to get the votes we need, we could get to 51.”

Senate women split

While the Senate’s record number of women are all pushing to address sexual assault issues, Gillibrand hasn’t won over all of them.

Perhaps the biggest splinter came with Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a former county prosecutor who called the debate over the chain of command a distraction from the real issues.

“I honestly do not believe that the chain of command at the disposition phase … is our main problem,” she said. “Our main problem is the military doesn’t even know how many rapes and sodomies they have. They have no idea.”

McCaskill said the Pentagon doesn’t keep accurate data differentiating between different categories of unwanted sexual contact. And it lacks the resources to conduct thorough investigations and needs a new database to track sex offenders.

“What a better place to be a roving predator than a military that moves you all the time, from country to country to base to base,” she said. “If we don’t get a handle on tracking these predators in a more aggressive way, we’ll never accomplish this mission.”

While praising Gillibrand’s leadership, McCaskill said the two Democrats have “an honest disagreement on how best to accomplish our shared goal of putting predators in prison and supporting victims during the most difficult moments of their lives.”

She also praised Levin’s approach, which sends all decisions not to prosecute a sexual assault case to the next commander up in the chain and gives each branch’s civilian service secretary the final say if a military lawyer recommends a case to be prosecuted but the commander disagrees.

“Frankly that goes further than I’ve dreamt we’d be able to go,” she said.